When the Tudor antiquarian, John Leland, visited the Shropshire church of Whitchurch in the 1530s, he saw the tomb of Sir Gilbert Talbot, a ‘knight of fame’, and noted, with apparent approval, that Talbot had brought the bones of his grandfather, the great soldier, John Talbot, earl of Shrewsbury, from Castillon, where he had fallen in 1453, for reinternment in the church. Sir Gilbert did not have a career to compare with that of his famous ancestor; none the less, despite the disadvantage of being a younger son, he was a notable servant, as soldier, administrator, and diplomat, of three Kings, Edward IV and the first two Tudors. Such future success had appeared improbable in his boyhood. His father, John Talbot, earl of Shrewsbury, had fallen in the Lancastrian cause in the battle of Northampton in July 1460, when Gilbert was about nine years old. Fortunately for the family, however, the new Yorkist King, Edward IV, was content for their lands to pass to Gilbert’s elder brother, another John, and, in the early 1470s, both brothers found places in Edward’s service, with the young Gilbert becoming one of the King’s cupbearers.

Gilbert’s career began in earnest with his elder brother’s death in June 1473 – in the mysterious words of Leland, ‘not without suspicion of poison’ – leaving as his heir a son, George, only five years old. This made Gilbert the effective head of the family during a long minority. As such, he led a retinue in the invasion of France in 1475, his first known military experience in what was to prove a long military career. He also advanced himself materially by marriage to a wealthy widow, as younger sons of leading families often did. In 1477 he married Elizabeth, widow of Thomas, Lord Scrope of Masham, and daughter of Ralph, Lord Greystoke, lord of the extensive lordship of Wem, about nine miles from the Talbot manor of Whitchurch.

Talbot’s prosperity was threatened by the deposition of Edward V.  He and the new King, Richard III, clearly distrusted each other. There was one obvious point of tension between them. Talbot’s stepson, Thomas, the new Lord Scrope of Masham, had been brought up in Richard’s household, and Talbot had every reason to consider this personal connexion a threat to his own wife’s interest in the Scrope lands. Probably more significant, however, was a more nebulous consideration. In constructing his title to the throne, the new King relied on the story of Edward IV’s alleged pre-contract with Gilbert’s paternal aunt, Eleanor, widow of Sir Thomas Butler of Sudeley (Gloucestershire). She had died in 1468, when Gilbert was only in his late teens, but there can be little doubt that the Talbots knew the truth (or otherwise) of the story. In this context, Gilbert can only have interpreted his removal from the Shropshire bench and the loss of his stewardship of the Talbot lordships of Blackmere and Whitchurch as evidence of the King’s hostility. 

His response was to return to his family’s earlier Lancastrian allegiance and enter communications with Henry Tudor. According to an admittedly rather doubtful source, The Song of Lady Bess, an early-modern narrative poem, there was a crucial meeting on 3 May 1485 at which he, alongside Tudor’s stepfather, Thomas, Lord Stanley, and others, firmly committed themselves to supporting Tudor. This story may be wrong in detail, but Talbot was certainly one of the first men of substance to join Henry after he landed at Milford Haven on the following 7 August. According to the Tudor chronicler, Polydore Vergil, he brought 500 men to Henry at Newport, about seven miles from the Talbot manor of Shifnal. He then went on to command the vanward of Henry’s army at the battle of Bosworth, where he was knighted.

Sir Gilbert’s reward was a place in the new King’s household, and, much more importantly, a grant of an inheritable estate in the valuable Worcestershire manor of Grafton.  These rewards were justified by further military service, both at home and abroad.

He fought for Henry at the battle of Stoke on 16 June 1487 and was there created a knight  banneret.  In June 1489 he was one of the commanders of the army, under the lieutenant of Calais, Giles Daubeney, Lord Daubeney, which repelled a Franco-Flemish force besieging the town of Diksmuide, some 50 miles to the east of the English garrison; and, in 1492, he joined with much of the political nation in the bloodless invasion of France. His military distinction was recognised in 1495 when he was admitted to the Order of the Garter, and he was again in arms in the autumn of 1497 to resist the unthreatening landing of Perkin Warbeck in Cornwall.  Later his status as soldier and courtier brought him an ambassadorial role. In February 1504 the King sent him to Rome to offer congratulations to the new Pope, Julius II, and to invest Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, duke of Urbino, with the Garter. The duke rewarded this service by commissioning Raphael, a native of Urbino, to paint an image of St. George adorned with the Garter, for presentation to his fellow Garter knight.

Not long after Sir Gilbert’s return from Rome, he was appointed as deputy-lieutenant of Calais, where he remained, on and off, for the remainder of his life.  As such, he took part in the 1513 invasion of France, commanded by his nephew, George, earl of Shrewsbury. A tantalising reference suggests that his service came at great personal cost. On 11 July it was reported that, during the siege of Thérouanne, some 30 miles south of Calais, the French artillery had done ‘great hurt’ to the besieging English camp. Talbot is said to have lost a leg and the chamberlain of the royal household, then Charles Somerset, Lord Herbert, to have been killed. In respect of Somerset’s death, the report was wrong, but it is possible that Talbot, who relinquished his Calais office soon afterwards, was severely injured.

On his death in August 1517, Sir Gilbert had an elaborate funeral, costing about £175, equivalent to the annual income of a substantial gentry family, before internment at Whitchurch (his tomb was lost when the church collapsed in 1711, rather ironically the year after his manor house at Grafton burnt down). He died a very wealthy man, in part because of the rewards of royal service but also because of his own entrepreneurial spirit.  His second wife, the widow of a London alderman and mercer, Richard Gardener, gave him an entrée into an élite commercial world, and he became a major wool merchant.  In the inventory taken on his death, his most valuable possession single possession was the store of wool he had at Calais, appraised at as much as £1850. In the longer context of the history of the comital family of Talbot, his successful career and his consequent establishment of a robust junior branch had great significance.  In 1618 his great-great-grandson, George, succeeded his childless fourth cousin, Edward Talbot, as earl of Shrewsbury.

SJP

The tomb was probably commissioned by her husband, Sir William Lichfield, a veteran of Agincourt, whose friendship with her father had enabled him to marry above his birth rank. Although, however, one of the couple’s children died with her, Elizabeth, aged in her early thirties on her death in about 1422, left two young daughters as her coheiresses. Her inheritance was thus destined to pass through the female line for a second successive generation.

That descent, however, for reasons that are unclear, did not follow predictable lines.  One of her daughters survived to have a daughter of her own, and the Cornwall inheritance should eventually have passed to this daughter, Margaret, the wife of Humphrey Stafford of Halmond’s Frome (Herefordshire), but it did not. Instead, it came to Humphrey Blount, to whose memory, and that of his wife, Elizabeth Winnington, the second tomb was erected. He was a descendant of the Cornwalls in the female line, the great-nephew of Sir John, and was quickly and unexpectedly able to establish title after the death, in 1446, of Lichfield, who had lived at Kinlet, as tenant by the courtesy (a husband’s life interest in the lands of his deceased wife), since Elizabeth’s death. Blount, from the least wealthy of the two surviving branches of an ancient family, now found himself a man of account. He moved to Kinlet from his ancestral manor of Balterley in Staffordshire, and with this move came, both geographically and tenurially, significant new connexions. Kinlet was held of Richard, duke of York’s lordship of Cleobury Mortimer, and, in the civil war of 1459-61, Humphrey put his new gains at hazard by committing himself to the duke’s cause. He was in his ranks at the rout at Ludford Bridge, and his Yorkist credentials were further confirmed in the following autumn, when he was named as sheriff of Shropshire after Yorkist victory at the battle of Northampton. This support explains his election for the Shropshire borough of Bridgnorth, about nine miles north of his home at Kinlet, to the first Parliament of the new reign. He no doubt sought the seat because he was excluded as sheriff from representing the county.

Blount’s active loyalty to the house of York was to be made further manifest in the crisis of 1470-1.  He fought for Edward IV at the battles of Barnet and Tewkesbury, where he was knighted.  This, however marked the highpoint of his career.  At his death a few years later, he was only in his mid-fifties. By 6 September 1477, when he made his will, he had moved, perhaps due to ill-health, from Kinlet to Worcester. It was, however, at Kinlet that he was interred, and he bequeathed to the church there a velvet gown for the making of a cope and a gold chain to be sold for the support of a chaplain. 

Blount was survived by his wife, Elizabeth Winnington.  She had played an important part in his elevation, and her career is as interesting as his own. Her early marital life had been troubled.  In 1426, at the age of only four, she had been contracted in marriage to Richard, the ten-year-old son and heir-apparent of Sir John Delves, a match that represented an alliance between two leading Cheshire families. Sir John, however, died in 1429, and his friend, Ralph Egerton, saw this as a means of advancing one of his own daughters at the expense of the young Elizabeth.  He persuaded Richard to disavow his intended bride. Years of uncertainty followed before, in July 1439, William Heyworth, bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, confirmed the validity of Richard’s marriage to Elizabeth.  The match, however, proved childless, with Richard dying in 1446. Lichfield died in the same month, enhancing Blount’s prospects and hence his qualifications as her suitor. For her part, Elizabeth had, as a result of her troubled marriage, a life interest in the caput honoris of the Delves family, the manor of Doddington. Her marriage to Blount, contracted soon afterwards, had obvious advantages for both bride and groom. 

Elizabeth was probably responsible for commissioning their fine tomb, for she survived her husband by some 25 years.  It is a commemoration not only of herself and her late husband, but also of their many children. The long side of the tomb appears to commemorate the three sons of the marriage, all of whom are mentioned in Sir Humphrey’s will, and the short side, at the effigies’ feet, their three daughters (the other two sides are blank).  This was a fitting to memorial to one who had elevated his family into the front rank of the Shropshire gentry, acquiring, seemingly against the odds, an inheritance to which his claim was far from unchallenged; and, early in the civil war of 1459-61, committing himself to what proved the winning side. He was unfortunate not to receive greater recognition from Edward IV.  He established a dynasty that survived at Kinlet in the male line until the death of a prominent parliamentarian, his great-grandson, Sir George, in 1581.  The most notable of the family, however, was George’s sister, Elizabeth, mistress of Henry VIII and mother of Henry Fitzroy, duke of Richmond.

Further reading

E. Norton, ‘The Depiction of Children on the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Century Tombs in Kinlet Church’, Transactions of the Shropshire Archaeological and Historical Society 87 (2012), 35-46.

A biography of Sir Humphrey Blount will appear in The Commons, 1461-1504 and those of Sir John Cornwall, Sir William Lichfield and Sir George Blount are in The Commons, 1386-1421, ii. 661-3; 1422-61, v. 275-8 and 1509-58, i. 445-7 respectively.

Election disputes were rare in late-medieval England. Indeed, it was not until the early fifteenth-century that any legal framework was established to define what constituted a dispute. Early parliamentary elections were regulated by custom not statute, and the understanding of what defined a valid and proper election was slow to develop. This unsatisfactory situation was remedied by a series of statutes passed between 1406 and 1445. These defined, amongst other things, the franchise (the famous 40s. freehold) and the proper form of a parliamentary return, and laid down penalties for sheriffs who acted against their terms. Much of what is known of disputed elections comes from litigation on these statutes. Such litigation was rare – very few elections were contested at the hustings, let alone disputed – but, when disputes did occur, they are often profoundly revealing of tensions within the county society. Since elections were rarely contested, contests reflected a failure of the compromises on which the smooth running of county society depended and represented, as Gerald Harriss has put it, ‘an opening for the serpent of division’ (G.L. Harriss, Shaping the Nation (Oxford, 2005), p. 172).

That metaphorical ‘serpent’ was active in Shropshire when electors assembled at Shrewsbury castle on 27 October 1485, two months after Henry Tudor’s victory at the battle of Bosworth, to elect two members to the first Parliament of the new reign. On the face of it, a contest appeared unlikely. Several of the county’s leading gentry had played a significant part in Tudor’s victory, and, with such apparent unity on the great question of national politics, it might have been expected that the two MPs would emerge without contention. This, however, did not prove to be the case, and the election pitted against each other the two Shropshire gentry who had most distinguished themselves for Tudor in the Bosworth campaign. Sir Gibert Talbot, uncle of the young George, earl of Shrewsbury, was one of the commanders of Tudor’s army, and Sir Richard Corbet of Moreton Corbet, at least on his own later claim, brought to the battle a contingent of as many as 800 men. Two months later, they had different roles to play: Talbot was the sheriff who conducted the election, and Corbet was a candidate for election. Now they found themselves on different sides. Corbet later sued Talbot for his supposed misconduct at the hustings. He alleged that, although he and another veteran of the Tudor side of Bosworth, Sir Thomas Leighton of Church Stretton, had been the choice of the electors, Talbot had made a false return, replacing his name with that of a lesser local figure, Sir Richard Ludlow of Stokesey.

The election illustrates how allegiances in national politics could be starkly contradicted at the local level. The common cause of Talbot and Corbet at Bosworth did not lessen their opposition in the tangled politics of the Welsh marches. In the days before Tudor landed at Milford Haven on 7 August, a conflict between Talbot’s friend, Sir Richard Croft of Croft (Herefordshire), and Corbet had broken into fatal violence. Three of Corbet’s Welsh servants were murdered by Croft’s men at Hopton castle, the property of Corbet’s mother. It is not unreasonable to suppose, given the insecurity of the times, that the three unlucky Welshmen were among a retinue recruited by Corbet in anticipation of Tudor’s landing. Since Croft was then treasurer of Richard III’s household as well as sheriff of Herefordshire, it might be assumed that his objection to this gathering was as a Ricardian partisan anxious to prevent recruitment for the Tudor’s cause. Yet this was very much not the case, for Croft, like many others, soon showed himself ready to abandon Richard III. There can, in short, be little doubt that the deaths at Hopton Castle had nothing to do with national politics but were an early manifestation of the personal hostility between Croft and Corbet.

It is thus not surprising that these local divisions complicated the election of 1485. The most likely scenario is that Croft, was determined to prevent his enemy’s election and called upon Talbot’s aid. Talbot responded by setting aside the poll and replacing Corbet with Ludlow, an inoffensive candidate from Croft’s point of view. By this act, he contributed to the growing rift between Croft and Corbet which again broke out in fatal violence as the two knights raised men to fight for the King when his throne was threatened by the rising of Lambert Simnel in 1487. Not until Corbet’s death in 1492 was the ‘serpent of division’ laid to rest.

SJP

Further reading
S.J. Payling and S. Cunningham, ‘From the Welsh Marches to the Royal Household: the Leominster Riots of 1487 and Uncertain Allegiances at the Heart of Henry VII’s Régime’, in The Fifteenth Century XX: Essays Presented to Rowena E. Archer, ed. L. Clark and J. Ross (Woodbridge, 2024)

It is surprising to find the sister of a King buried in a remote Shropshire church.  Henry IV’s sister, Elizabeth, in marked contrast to her elder sister, Philippa (d.1415), wife of King John I of Portugal, grandly entombed in Batalha Monastery, found her final resting in the modest country church of Burford.  The two sisters were also markedly contrasted in life.

Philippa’s sole marriage was made in 1387 to advance, unsuccessfully as it transpired, the claims of her step-mother, Constance of Castile, to the throne of Castile. Elizabeth had a rather more colourful marital history.  In 1380, when she was about 17, her father, John of Gaunt, contracted a conventional marriage for her: John Hastings, earl of Pembroke, was his ward, and by birth and wealth a suitable spouse. There was, however, a problem, that Gaunt chose to ignore. The groom was some ten years younger than his bride, and it would be some years before they could live together as a married couple. In the interim, the young earl grew up in Gaunt’s household, while Elizabeth was sent to the royal court to, in the words of the Westminster chronicler, ‘study the behaviour and customs of courtly society’. That study took a predictable and active form. She formed a romantic attachment with Richard II’s half-brother, Sir John Holland, some ten years her senior, who had, rather ironically, been present at her marriage to Pembroke.

Whatever her precise marital status, this attachment was less than ideal.  Holland, despite his grand birth, was a younger son with no great financial prospects, and he had shown himself to have tendencies violent beyond even the generous limits of his times. None the less, in its most notorious manifestation, that violence had been exercised in defence of Elizabeth’s father.  In 1384, when a Carmelite friar denounced Gaunt to the King’s face as a traitor, Holland took a leading part in the torture and murder of the either deranged or unwisely forthright friar (‘Am I not your uncle?’: John of Gaunt, the murder of Friar Latimer and the Salisbury Parliament of 1384, 8 March 2022).  It was perhaps Holland’s apparent devotion to him that led Gaunt to abandon the objections raised by prudence to his daughter’s liaison; or else, perhaps more probably, he found himself faced with a fait accompli when she fell pregnant.  What is not clear is whether the Pembroke marriage had already been set aside before this happy event.  Since the marriage had been contracted when the groom was under the canonical age of consent, its dissolution was a matter of no great difficulty, and it is probable that it had already been dissolved as unsuitable before her affair with Holland.  However, it makes a better story to assume a causal link, and contemporary chroniclers were not slow in proposing one.  In any event, the new marriage was made before the child was born.  The young couple were married at Plymouth on 24 June 1386 as her father made ready for a campaign in Spain.  Holland had a leading position of command in that campaign, and his new wife accompanied him, perhaps not the ideal start to married life.

A less than ideal start was followed by a calamitous end.  In the late 1390s the marriage was compromised by mounting political crises.  As Richard II’s autocracy created unbridgeable divides among the leading aristocracy, Elizabeth faced a terrible dilemma. Her husband had never enjoyed the same close relationship with her brother, the future Henry IV, as he did with her father, and, given his own kinship with Richard II, it is not surprising that he should have sided with the King.  His reward was promotion to the dukedom of Exeter.  By contrast, her brother found himself banished and excluded from inheriting the great Lancastrian inheritance on his father’s death in February 1399.  Even, however, against this background, all would have been well if Holland had been able to reconcile himself to the new political disposition after Henry returned triumphantly from exile to depose Richard II.   Given his marriage to Elizabeth, such a reconciliation would, no doubt, have been expected (although it must be said that Henry did not exert himself to bring it about), and it must have been to her dismay that her husband chose to rise in a futile conspiracy to depose her brother.  Taking flight, his reward was execution in January 1400 at the hands of a group of Essex peasants.

Elizabeth, not seemingly one to dwell on life’s setbacks, lost little time in making a new marriage.  1400 was a momentous year for her, beginning with her husband’s death and ending with the death of her eldest son, Richard Holland.  In the interval, however, there was a much happier moment.  At a tournament held at York in July, her attention was caught by the skill of one of its participants, Sir John Cornwall, a few years her junior.  As the son of a younger son of a Shropshire knightly family, and notwithstanding the fact that his mother was, reputedly at least, a niece of John de Montfort (d.1399), duke of Brittany, he hardly had the social qualifications as a husband for a King’s sister, yet the couple were married by the end of the year. If Henry IV originally viewed this with disapproval, he quickly came to a brighter view, making lavish grants in favour of the couple and, in February 1405, standing godfather to their son. The couple went on to prosper.  The profits of Cornwall’s military career compensated him for his lack of hereditary expectations. Through their only son, John, the couple could look forward to establishing a dynasty.

Again, however, tragedy intervened.  Just as war had made Cornwall rich, it also ended his male line.  Late in 1421, at the siege of Meaux, the young John was killed by a cannonball in the presence of his father (H.W.Kleineke, ‘1421: a troubled royal Christmas’, 11 Jan. 2022).  Elizabeth did not long survive this loss, dying in November 1425.  Cornwall, for reasons one can only speculate, did not remarry.

It is not known why Elizabeth should have been buried in the church of Burford.  Her husband was not the lord of the manor, only the representative of a junior branch of the knightly family long established there.  Further, he had, before her death, purchased the extensive lordship of Ampthill in Bedfordshire and began the building of a great castle there.  That castle, not yet complete on Elizabeth’s death, had no doubt been intended as the grand residence of a new dynasty, and the church of Ampthill might have become its mausoleum.   The only plausible explanation for her burial at Burford is her personal affection for the place, perhaps because she had spent time there during Cornwall’s absences fighting in France.

Elizabeth’s career was a remarkable one. She demonstrated a degree of independence unusual for an aristocratic woman. She repudiated the marriage made for her by her powerful father when she was in her late teens; she then chose her own husband in what appears to have been scandalous circumstances; and, as a widow in her thirties, she followed her own inclinations in marrying below her rank to one of the foremost soldiers of the day. No doubt part of the reason for this seeming freedom was the indulgence of a father and brother to a favoured daughter and sister. Yet that indulgence was only necessary because of Elizabeth’s spirited independence.  

SP

In the autumn of 1459 years of uneasy truce between the factions of York and Lancaster ended in dramatic fashion. The Yorkist lords rose in rebellion, motivated either by a ruthless desire to seize control of the King and his government or by the fear that their lives and lands were endangered by the increasing militancy of the Lancastrian regime (in which effective power lay with the queen-consort, Margaret of Anjou, rather than the King). The truth probably lies somewhere between these extremes, but, whatever their motivation, they suffered a humiliating reverse. 

At the outset, their plan was audacious. They sought to bring their forces together, with Richard, duke of York, coming from his castle of Ludlow on the Welsh Marches, Richard Neville, earl of Salisbury, from his castle of Middleham in north Yorkshire, and Salisbury’s son, Richard, earl of Warwick, from Calais, where he was captain. It is not known where they originally intended to rendezvous: it may have been the earl of Warwick’s great castle at Warwick, near the royal castle at Kenilworth, where the King spent most of his time. This plan was, however, soon modified by the speed and completeness of the Lancastrian response. Warwick, travelling across the country from Kent, had too few men to risk a confrontation with a royalist army in the vicinity of Warwick, so he diverted to meet with the duke at Ludlow. His father was not so successful in avoiding a battle. 

Departing from his first path, he too made for Ludlow and was intercepted by a Lancastrian force under James Tuchet, Lord Audley, at Blore Heath in Staffordshire on 23 Sept. His victory there did little to disguise the weakness of the Yorkist position. Indeed, in one important sense it made that position worse.  Having engaged with a royal army, albeit one in which the King himself was not present, the Yorkists could no longer portray themselves as mere reformers of royal government, anxious to protect the King and the realm from what they saw as ‘evil’ councillors.  Rather they now appeared as traitors in open rebellion. This might not have mattered so much had they not been seriously outnumbered by the main royal army. A series of manoeuvres followed in which they sought to avoid battle, advancing to Worcester, where they made a declaration of loyalty to the King in the cathedral, before retreating back to Ludlow in face of the royal advance. 

The evening of 12 October found them drawn up in a defensive position at Ludford Bridge on the river Teme, below Ludlow Castle. Defensive position or not, however, they can have had no doubt that they faced defeat. Fears about taking up arms in face of the King’s person had brought about defections from their ranks, including those of their most professional troops, brought from the Calais garrison by Warwick. The violence of Blore Heath had removed the option of a surrender on terms, such as had ended York’s Dartford rising of 1452, for the King was not prepared to extend his pardon to Salisbury.  The only option was an ignominious one. By the morning of 13 October the Yorkist lords had fled, the duke of York making his way across Wales to Ireland and the Neville earls, accompanied by York’s son, the earl of March (soon to be Edward IV), to the south coast and thence to Calais. The duke of York could hardly have suffered a greater humiliation, not only abandoning his town of Ludlow to the plunder of the Lancastrian army but leaving his wife to fall into Lancastrian hands. At least, however, he and his allies lived to fight another day.

The confrontation between York and Lancaster now shifted from the military to the parliamentary sphere. On 9 October, as the King made his way to Ludlow, the Lancastrian government had been so confident of victory that it had issued writs summoning Parliament to meet at Coventry on 20 November. There can be little doubt that the decision had already been taken to confiscate the estates of the Yorkists through the parliamentary process of attainder. The first of the elections was speedily held. On 13 October, notwithstanding the event of the previous night, hustings convened at Hereford, some 23 miles from Ludford Bridge. Although two Lancastrians were elected, Sir John Barre and the influential lawyer, Thomas Fitzharry, it is remarkable that, among those present, were the duke of York’s receiver-general, John Milewater, and Thomas Bromwich, one of the leaders of the local Yorkist faction. It is thus likely that several of those gathered at the hustings had been on opposing sides at Ludford Bridge the day before.

The elections held in other counties over the next five weeks had similar results. The overwhelming proportion of those elected were, if not partisans of the Lancastrian cause, then at least sympathetic to it. This was a reflection of the prevailing political climate rather than the product of the electoral interference of the government, but the result was the same. The Yorkist lords, and several of their lesser supporters, were duly attainted and their extensive estates taken into royal hands.  Their defeat appeared complete, and had they stood and fought at Ludford, it probably would have been. As it transpired, their safe havens abroad and the support they enjoyed in London and Kent laid the basis for their successful invasion in the summer of 1460. The rout of Ludford had merely masked the fundamental weaknesses of the Lancastrian regime.

S.J.P.

THE HISTORY OF PARLIAMENT: THE HOUSE OF COMMONS 1422-1461, edited by Linda Clark, is out now. For further details about the volumes, including purchasing information, visit the Cambridge University Press website, here.

Sir Christopher Talbot (1415-43) was a notable MP in two respects, for his high birth and for his tragic and puzzling end. As a younger son of the great soldier, John, Lord Talbot, it was natural that he should begin a military career at an early age. Knighted while still short of his majority, he commanded his own retinue during the difficult campaign of the winter of 1435-6 when a peasant rising in the Pays de Caux threatened the English position and Paris was lost. He appears to have been an adept soldier, acquiring a reputation as a jouster. In November 1440 one of the correspondents of John Paston wrote of the arrival in England of a Spanish knight, ‘wyth a kercheff of plesaunce i wrapped aboute hys arme’, who was to run a course ‘for his sovereyn lady sake’ against either Sir Christopher or another noted knight, Sir Richard Wydeville.

In 1441, in what was perhaps intended to be only a brief break from military activity, he began to play a part in local administration in both Shropshire and Yorkshire, two counties in which his family had extensive estates. He was elected to represent the former county in the Parliament of 1442, no doubt in his father’s interest to rally the support in the Commons for the financial grants necessary to the defence of Normandy. Very soon after Parliament assembled Lord Talbot himself returned from thence to raise further troops, and it was during his brief visit that Sir Christopher became an earl’s son: Lord Talbot was created earl of Shrewsbury on 4 May.

In the early 1440s Sir Christopher was thus a significant figure in his own right with a place in the royal household to add to his recommendations. These court connexions, together with his father’s influence, helped him to a marriage that allowed him to overcome the financial disadvantages of a younger son. John, Lord Tiptoft, died in the early days of 1443, and with almost indecent haste, he married his widow, Joyce. She was a woman of great wealth: not only did she have significant dower and jointure holdings from her first marriage, but she was one of the two coheiress to the lands of her father, Edward, Lord Cherleton of Powis, and through her mother she had title to a share, albeit a small one, of the Holand earldom of Kent.

Sir Christopher now had wealth to add to his important family connexions, and he looked set to become an important figure in the court of Henry VI. His good fortune was not, however, to last. Within a few months of his marriage he met his death in strange circumstances. On 10 August 1443, a Welsh knight, Sir Gruffydd Vaughan of Trelydan (in Guilsfield in Montgomeryshire), ran him through with a lance at Caus castle (Shropshire), the property of Humphrey, earl of Stafford.  His death seems to have happened during a tournament, but it was not seen as an accident. On the following 17 October a jury, sitting at Shrewsbury before a royal commission, placed the death in the context of a treasonable rising: it claimed that Sir Gruffydd and others imagining the death of the King had collected many traitors from Wales at Caus where Sir Gruffydd had killed Sir Christopher, described in the indictment as Vaughan’s master. Later, on 16 June 1444, a further indictment was laid, again at Shrewsbury, on this occasion before the Shropshire j.p.s. headed by Sir Christopher’s elder brother, Sir John.

The Crown added its own summary action to the indictments. The lands of Vaughan and others implicated in the death were declared forfeit; a reward of 500 marks was offered for Vaughan’s arrest; and when a general pardon was granted in May 1446 those involved in the murder were specifically excluded. This exemption may have moved a local lord, Sir Henry Grey, count of Tancarville, to take the law into his own hands: in July 1447 he had Vaughan executed at his castle at Welshpool. He had two obvious motives for this violent act, namely to claim the substantial reward and, perhaps more powerfully, to avenge Sir Christopher’s widow, who was Sir Henry’s maternal aunt. He was, however, roundly condemned by the Welsh bards Lewis Glyn Cothi and Dafydd Llwyd, who accused him of securing Vaughan’s person by the duplicitous offer of a safe-conduct. In short, the true circumstances of Sir Christopher’s tragic death are beyond recovery, but there is every reason to suppose that it was murder rather than accident.

Talbot’s death was soon followed by another. Even though his wife was in her forties at the time of his death, she was then pregnant. The infant’s life was to be very brief: at some date between September 1443 and September 1444 the borough authorities at Shrewsbury spent 10d. on wine given to the Talbot servants who had come to the town for the burial of Sir Christopher’s child. Joyce, Lady Powis, did not long survive this double blow. She died in the autumn of 1446 and thus did not live to see her second husband apparently avenged.

SP